Security

Our Mission

SafetyCulture’s mission is to help companies achieve safer and higher quality workplaces all around the world through innovative mobile products. We do this through our flagship Software-as-Service (SaaS) application iAuditor. These products are used by approximately 18,500 companies around the world in a large number of industries in a variety of use cases.

We take pride that SafetyCulture is seen as a world leader in products that promote safety and quality, and we know how important our role is in helping our customers improve their day-to-day operations.

We see our approach to cyber security as a key pillar in maintaining our status as a leader in this space, and this page provides an overview of how we approach cyber security as an organization.

Overview

SafetyCulture has an active, robust and continually improving cyber security program in place to ensure that our organization and the products we provide are secured. SafetyCulture’s cyber security program employs a number of controls at a technical and operational level to ensure that we have an effective, defense-in-depth approach to protect from cyber attacks and secure the data handled by our SaaS application iAuditor.

Key features include:

A security program aligned with industry best practice standards, including the use of cloud platforms that are compliant with trusted security benchmarks including ISO27001 and SOC 2.

A focus on getting the basics right, in recognizing that the fundamentals of security remain the most critical. This includes:

Employing robust mechanisms to ensure that access to SafetyCulture systems and customer data is carefully controlled.

Encrypting the customer data we hold (both in transit and at rest).

Ensuring we promptly apply patches within our IT environment and to our products to minimize the opportunity for vulnerabilities to be exploited by cyber attackers.

Actively monitoring and testing our IT environment and products for emerging vulnerabilities and remedying these as a priority.

Having a defined process in place, supported by a dedicated team, to provide effective support and response in the event of security incidents.

Applying due diligence to ensure our service providers are meeting industry standards when it comes to security. We know that the security of our partners directly affects us and our customers, so we choose who we work with very carefully.

The content below provides an overview of the various parts of our security program.

Organizational Security Practices

Our approach to security is focused on aligning with recommended best practices in recognized standards such as the NIST, ISO27001 & SOC Frameworks.

Security Governance

SafetyCulture has a documented set of policies and procedures that defines our approach to security as an organization. These policies and procedures are shared with all staff and reviewed and updated at least annually (and more frequently if material changes are required) to ensure our approach to security remains current.

We focus on ensuring accountability for security throughout our company. To this end, we have an information security management forum set up with key stakeholders from across SafetyCulture that regularly meets to review and discuss security related matters, and make any decisions that have an influence on our approach to cyber security.

Access to Internal Systems and Cloud Platforms

We ensure that access to systems in our IT environment, including the cloud platforms we use, is restricted to employees who specifically require this access for their work.

All administrator access requires multi-factor authentication and employees accessing our environment are required to use an approved VPN solution.

Access permissions to our systems are regularly reviewed on an employee-by-employee basis and modified promptly. As part of our off-boarding process, all access to systems and services for departing employees is revoked.

Third Party Security

We carefully review the security practices of third parties we engage – initially and on an on-going basis to ensure their practices meet industry standards and are compliant with our own privacy and security policies and procedures. If a third party requires access to our systems we ensure that access is limited specifically to the purpose for which they have been engaged.

As Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of our primary providers, we engage with them using the Shared Responsibility Model for security and compliance, ensuring there is a clear definition of who assumes responsibility for what when it comes to security. AWS is accredited by and compliant with a large number of the latest industry standards – more information can be found here.

Network Security

SafetyCulture’s corporate networks are protected with firewalls as well as IDS & IPS technology at the perimeter (provided by dedicated managed Cisco security devices) so that we can detect and protect against any malicious traffic.

For our cloud-based platforms, we primarily use Amazon Web Services (AWS) who provide a multi-layered strategy to defend from external attacks. At an infrastructure level, AWS employs strategies such as network device access control, data segregation using firewalls and virtual private clouds to filter out malicious traffic and make use of extensive logging and monitoring to prevent network-based attacks. At an application level we take advantage of AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield to prevent web-based and denial of service (DoS) attacks against our products.

Logging & Monitoring

SafetyCulture makes use of a centralized logging system which includes application access audit events. These logs are retained for 90 days. We also use Amazon ELB logs to track service access requests. Logs stored in AWS are not able to be modified. Access is restricted to those who require access for their job roles. We recognize the importance of reviewing logs regularly to identify malicious user activity and identify potential vulnerabilities with our products; we are in the process of incorporating this as part of our security program.

Security Awareness Training

All SafetyCulture personnel undergo regular security awareness training for both technical and non-technical roles. Security training materials are also developed for individual staff where required to ensure they are equipped to handle the specific security-oriented role requirements.

Patching and Vulnerability Management

Patching of our IT environment is one of the most fundamentally important measures we can take to stay secure against a potential security breach. To do this we:

We use AWS System Manager to deploy patches for our cloud-based infrastructure;

We utilize device management solutions to ensure important patches are installed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We deploy patches for the most critical vulnerabilities first, with patches being deployed to our non-production environment for initial testing before being quickly propagated across the IT environment.

Protecting Customer Data

SafetyCulture takes the security of our customers’ data extremely seriously. We take a number of steps to ensure customer data is carefully protected.

Restricting Access to Data

SafetyCulture takes a number of measures to help protect customer data from inappropriate access or use by unauthorized persons (either external or internal). Customer data is only stored in our production environment, and access to that data by SafetyCulture employees is limited only to the employees who require access to perform their standard duties. Access to customer data is managed using access control and authentication tools (including the use of two factor authentication) provided by Amazon Web Services and our other cloud partners.

Customer data is only used for purposes that are compatible with providing the contracted services, such as troubleshooting technical support requests. For full details please refer to the SafetyCulture Privacy Policy.

In the rare case that SafetyCulture support employees need to access the full body of a specific customer’s data then SafetyCulture will always require consent from a customer before accessing this data.

We do not store or cache customer financial data used in conjunction with billing through the SafetyCulture platform, and our employees do not have direct access to billing data.

Physical Access to Customer Data

All customer data is hosted on infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services which maintains physical security of their sites using industry best practice controls as outlined in their security whitepaper.

No customer data is stored at any of our physical office locations.

Encryption of Data

SafetyCulture has mechanisms in place to ensure that our customers’ data is protected both at rest and when in transit. At rest, all customer data is encrypted using AES-256 with keys managed through Amazon Web Services’ Key Management Service. All data is stored securely and subject to the security policies and procedures of AWS.

To protect data in transit, SafetyCulture uses Transport Layer Security and enforces a minimum standard of TLS v1.2 using 128-bit cipher keys. We support connections with up to 256-bit cipher keys for use with an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher.

Access to data backups is restricted to only specific employees of SafetyCulture where that access is required as part of their job role.

Deletion and Disposal of Data

Our customer data is principally stored in, and subject to the deletion and disposal procedures of Amazon Web Services. These procedures include a secure process to logically wipe retired media. Wiped media is then inspected to ensure to ensure the successful destruction of data.

Any SafetyCulture owned hardware that contains confidential data – including SafetyCulture backups – are subject to industry standard logical data destruction before recycling. Where possible SafetyCulture will use AES-256 GCM encryption on any digital copies.

Securing our Products

We recognize that for the bulk of customers, their principal experience with SafetyCulture will be through our flagship product iAuditor. Security forms an important part of the way this product is developed, and operates, as discussed below.

Secure Software Development Practices

As part of our product development process, every code change is reviewed prior to the release of any changes into production, which includes observance of security best practice. We also segregate our development, test and production environments.

Change Control

All changes to SafetyCulture products are actively tested during their development to ensure the impact to end users is evaluated prior to deployment, and any significant changes are included in the production release notes.

SafetyCulture employs change tracking and version control to actively monitor and manage changes to the code base of our products. We also use Amazon CloudTrail for tracking any underlying configuration changes to the cloud platform on which our products operate.

Vulnerability Identification & Patch Management

We work hard to minimize the number of vulnerabilities that arise in our products, and we recognize that it is important to take proactive steps to make sure we become address any vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. To that end, SafetyCulture actively monitors and tests for vulnerabilities in our applications. We run a private bug bounty program in recognition of the fact that a community of independent security researchers incentivized to test our products on an on-going basis to identify any potential issues will only serve to strengthen the security of our products.

Where a vulnerability is identified (internally or externally), the issue is tracked and prioritized according to the potential severity of impact to a customer. Resolution times will depend on the severity and can include round-the-clock work by our developers until the issue is remediated.

Patches for identified vulnerabilities are developed and released into the production environment through a continuous integration process (CI/CD) and applied as soon as possible.

Handling Security Incidents

While we do our utmost to prevent any security incidents, we recognize that we also need to be prepared to handle these incidents should they arise to minimize any potential impact to our customers and SafetyCulture. We have a range of measures in place including:

A documented Incident Management Procedure that defines our process for handling the confidentiality, integrity or availability of our IT environment and applications.

A dedicated team of SafetyCulture employees spread across Oceania, the USA and Southeast Asia to provide support during an incident.

Disaster recovery plans and contingency strategies which can be executed to help us maintain continuity of operations during an incident. This includes the use of multiple geographical availability zones via Amazon Web Services and the replication of data across multiple systems in those availability zones. This ensures continued data access during incidents affecting system availability and provides data redundancy in the case of system or data storage failures.

SafetyCulture will promptly alert affected clients of major incidents impacting the availability of SafetyCulture services or data and of any incidents affecting the confidentiality and integrity of user data as per our SafetyCulture Privacy Policy.

Final Thoughts

SafetyCulture considers cyber security a fundamental part of our business, and of the products we provide to businesses around the world. While the controls and measures we have in place extends significantly beyond what is covered here, this page has been designed to provide an overall understanding of the multi-faceted approach we take, and our commitment to, security.

If you have any questions about the contents, or require more information about our approach to support, security or privacy please contact us at the details below: